In the modern world, almost every business entity is a provider of either products or services, or both. Typically, the products or services must meet one or more criteria which are established by the provider or its customers who purchase such products or services. For example, a customer which purchases information processing services may require that ninety-five percent of the customer's trivial, interactive transactions be processed within one second after a provider has received information for the transactions.
In order to ensure that a provider is meeting these criteria, the provider must monitor the manufacture, distribution, performance, or delivery of the products or services. Previous systems and methods for monitoring were capable of alerting a provider that products or services had failed to meet the appropriate criteria after the failure had occurred. Unfortunately, these systems and methods provided no mechanism to warn a provider before such failures occurred so that the provider could prevent or reduce the impact of the failures. Furthermore, the prior systems and methods did not identify the cause of the failures.